NIGHT FALLS ON NARNIA THEY all stood beside Aslan, on his right side, and looked through the open doorway.
The bonfire had go. On the earth all was blaess: in fact you could not have told that you were looking into a wood if you had not seehe dark shapes of the trees ended and the stars began. But when Aslan had roared yet again, out on their left they saw another black shape. That is, they saw another patch where there were no stars: and the patch rose up higher and higher and became the shape of a man, the hugest of all giants. They all knew Narnia well enough to work out where he must be standing. He must be on the high moorlands that stretch away to the North beyond the River Shribble.
Then Jill aace remembered how once long ago, in the deep caves beh those moors, they had seen a great giant asleep aold that his name was Father Time, and that he would wake on the day the world ended.
"Yes," said Aslan, though they had not spoken. "While he lay dreaming his name was Time. Now that he is awake he will have a new one.」
Then the great giant raised a horn to his mouth. They could see this by the ge of the black shape he made against the stars. After that - quite a bit later, because sound travels so slowly - they heard the sound of the horn: high and terrible, yet of a strange, deadly beauty.
Immediately the sky became full of shooting stars. Even one shooting star is a fihing to see; but these were dozens, and then scores, and then hundreds, till it was like silver rain: and it went on and on. And when it had gone on for some while, one or two of them began to think that there was another dark shape against the sky as well as the giants. It was in a different place, right overhead, up in the very roof of the sky as you might call it.
"Perhaps it is a cloud," thought Edmund. At any rate, there were no stars there: just blaess. But all around, the downpour of stars went on. And thearless patch
began to grow, spreading further and further out from the tre of the sky. And presently a quarter of the whole sky was black, and then a half, and at last the rain of shooting stars was going on only low dowhe horizon.
With a thrill of wonder (and there was some terror in it too) they all suddenly realized what was happening. The spreading blaess was not a cloud at all: it was simply emptiness. The black part of the sky was the part in which there were no stars left. All the stars were falling: Aslan had called them home.
The last few seds before the rain of stars had quite ended were very exg. Stars began falling all round them. But stars in that world are not the great flaming globes they are in ours. They are people (Edmund and Lucy had o one). So now they found showers of glittering people, all with long hair like burning silver and spears like white-hot metal, rushing down to them out of the black air, swifter than falling stohey made a hissing noise as they landed and burnt the grass. And all these stars glided past them and stood somewhere behind, a little to the right.
This was a great advantage, because otherwise, now that there were no stars in the sky, everything would have been pletely dark and you could have seen nothing. As it was, the crowd of stars behind them cast a fierce, white light over their shoulders. They could see mile upon mile of Narnian woods spread out before them, looking as if they were floodlit. Every bush and almost e